If you’re a fan of MST3K, you are well acquainted with “Manos: The Hands Of Fate,” widely considered one of the worst movies ever made. Till now, the only prints of this steaming pile of cinema have been terrible in quality, matching the other aspects of the film, such as plot, dialogue and acting. Well…

Good news, everyone!

A pristine work print of Manos has been found and is being restored. Oh, boy.

The Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory reported in April 1947 on spin tunnel testing on a swept wing model of a P-47. The modifications were made to an existing Langley spin tunnel model, and it appears that the design was a NACA-Langley design rather than a Republic Aircraft design. By 1947, a swept wing piston engined aircraft was already an anachronism… unless there was some thought of making a research vehicle from a P-47 (as was done with the P-63 to make the L-39), by this time any swept wing fighter design would have had turbojet engines. Most likely the idea was to simply represent a generic swept wing aircraft, using on-hand resources.

The horizontal stabilizer was tested in two positions…. the P-47 original, and moved upwards and slightly forwards.

APR issue V3N2 is just about done. All the articles have been written; I’m just working on some editing and some artwork. Hopefully it should be available by the end of the week.

This issue will have an article by Dennis Jenkins on a transport version of the F-106; a large (90+ page) article on the Lockheed STAR Clipper and descendant designs for a 1.5-stage-to-orbit Space Shuttle concept; and a sizable article on antecedents and derivatives of the Northrop F-23, including the “Christmas Fighter,” the NATF-23 carrier-based fighter, the operational F-23A design, the single-engined Multi-Role Fighter and the near-legendary F/B-23 tactical bomber.

In putting this issue together, there are some blank spots on a few pages, a result of formatting the text and images. The way most magazines deal with that is to hire editors who can arrange things professionally… and to stuff the magazine full of ads. I can’t afford the former. So I’ve decided to sell ad space.

What I’m offering is to put your “classified-style” ad in the issue for five bucks ($5). I don’t have many hard and fast rules here, just these:

Your ad can contain a web address, email address, mailing address and up to thirty to fifty or so words (I’m flexible here).

The ads do not need to relate to APR or aerospace.They can be for anything except for illegal, scamery or offensive stuff (I reserve the right to say “no”).

If interested, send me an email letting me know, or drop a comment below. Don’t pay just yet… I’ll wait till I see what sort of response I get and how many I can fit in.

An odd gap in my records is a lack of good diagrams of the B-52. I’m not looking for them for resale, but for modeling and research purposes. I’ve a number of small Boeing diagrams, and some larger non-Boeing diagrams, but no good detailed large-format Boeing layout drawings of any version of the B-52.

If you have or know of a good B-52 (any model) layout drawing, either on paper or digital, please let me know. If the diagram goes into surface panel details, so much the better, but what I really need are reliable lines for the aircraft as a whole.

There are some places women should not go. This is not a sexist sentiment, but a purely practical one. I’d recommend evacuating all women and girls from nations undergoing Islamic revolutions, and leave them male-only societies for, oh, 65 years or so. That should make everybody happy.

In short, some tests with dead chickens shows that a pose often found with dinosaurs (specifically, the head being pulled back, exposing the neck) doesn’t occur when the body is left to decompose on dry land, but occurs almost instantly when the body is submerged in water. Now, anyone who knows anything about fossilization knows that the most likely situation when a land critter would get fossilized is when it is very quickly buried. This rarely happens on dry land; happens with some regularity with mudslides and flash floods. Since mudslides and flash floods tend to involve large quantities of water… this new study makes all kinds of logical scientific sense.

But not to everyone.

There’s always *somebody* who can take a straightforward logical proposition and twist it into utter bilge. Behold the medieval moronery on display among many of the commenters on this Free Republic thread:

Oh, boy! Who wants to fill up your tank of stupid today? The patriarchal race to colonize Mars is just another example of male entitlement NBC News is actually promoting this rubbish. These men, particularly Musk, are not only heavily invested in who can get their rocket into space first, but in colonizing Mars. The […]

The Falcon Heavy is an absurdly low-cost heavy lift rocket F9H in reusable configuration (payload seems to be about 40 tones to LEO) costs $90 million. Fully expendable (64 tons to orbit), it’s $150 million. That sounds like a lot. It’s certainly more than I can afford. But compare it to the competition. The Delta […]

From Those Were The Days… currently on eBay is a truly impressive piece: Douglas Aircraft Co 1960’s Skeletal Wood Model of the C-5 Cargo Proposal LARGE The Buy-It-Now price is a substantial fifteen grand. It shows the internal structure of the Douglas proposal of the CX-HLS, what became the C-5, at fairly large scale. More […]

The Daily Caller points out something obvious: According To The FBI, Knives Kill Far More People Than Rifles In America – It’s Not Even Close As could be expected, after the Parkland school shooting the Civilian Enfeeblement Movement has been freshly reinvigorated. Kids are being used to emotionally agitate for the latest round of gun […]

A tracking website: Where is Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster with Starman? The “Chart” page has an overview of planetary positions w/Roadster that you can view into the future using a slider. Plus… available on Amazon:

This headline is a couple years old, but, wow: German government plans to spend 93.6 billion euros on refugees by end 2020: Spiegel That works out to roughly 20 to 25 billion Euros per year to deal with a problem without actually trying to *end* the problem. Thus it seems that 20 billion euro per […]

“Black Panther” seems like it makes some people a little passionate. Oddly, even though I’m not exactly a Marvel comics fanboy, I’ve caught every Marvel comics movie since “Iron Man” on opening day. Until “Black Panther.” Somehow I seem to have missed that one so far. I think perhaps the excessively matronizing Admiral Holdo in […]

The NERVA nuclear rocket, studied throughout the sixties into the early 1970’s, would have been a great way to propel spacecraft. But a nuclear rocket is not the same sort of reactor as is generally designed for use in space to generate electrical power. A NERVA can produce *gigawatts* of thermal energy, energy which is […]

Well, this is multiple levels of disturbing: Scoop: Skirmish in Beijing over the nuclear football Apparently something a little less than entirely awesome may have occurred when Trump visited China back in November: a US military aide carrying the “nuclear football” was separated by Chinese security officers from the Presidential group. There was a physical […]

A few decades before the “X-Wing” configuration gained a measure of popularity, Hughes Tool Company made a detailed study of a somewhat similar concept, the “rotor/wing.” This was a three-bladed helicopter rotor attached to a large central lifting surface, either a circular disk or a triangular structure. The rotor was not turned the conventional way […]